Writing & Reading Club Fall 2016

Course Overview

Grade: 4-8

Reading Comprehension equips students with the skills necessary to probe diverse, complex texts for themes, main ideas, supporting evidence and text-to-world connections. But this course will not only cultivate your child as a skilled reader. It will develop him or her as a critical thinker and thoughtful respondent as well. First, readers will dissect, scrutinize, and question literary text by using varied pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading strategies. As a result, they will more easily be able to uncover and understand common relationships in reading like comparison and contrast, cause and effect and chronology. Next, students will synthesize and analyze informational text for key points and supporting evidence in order to persuade, inform or explain. Lastly, and perhaps as notably, students will determine meanings of new words by deconstructing them into their most finite Latin and Greek roots and into their affixes. Best of all, students will receive small group instruction that allows for more individualized attention and increased retention of learned skills, thus preparing them to “read between the lines” in no time!

Schedule

Course Overview

Grade: 3-8

Creative Writing is a course that will both nurture and refine your child’s expressive writing abilities. However, your student will not only be stretched imaginatively through free-verse. He or she will also be challenged to analyze specific literary forms and to create works using varying literary techniques. Your writer will develop a more sophisticated writing style, employing such tools as sensory language, economy of language and language development. For example, your student will explore how characteristics like theme, mood, tone and point-of-view give stories depth, while devices like similes, metaphors and personification make poetry more visual. Lastly, and as importantly, your child will be introduced to global genres including: haikus, tankas, sonnets, fables, parables, myths, and novellas.

Schedule

Course Overview

Grade: 5-8

Writing Intensive is a rigorous expository writing course. Specifically, it will help students to organize, develop and support ideas with synthesized and cited evidence, particularly when writing to persuade, inform and explain. By using the implements of the Step Up to Writing curriculum, a nationally touted writing strategy, students will better visualize the five steps of the Writing Process: Pre-Writing, Drafting, Revising, Editing and Publishing. As a result, your student will begin scribing with greater clarity, conciseness, coherence and standard language conventions. This said, grammar usage, sentence structure and vocabulary development are three additional core components that will be gained in this course. Lastly, students in this class will be required to analyze and respond to a wide range of reading prompts, some of which include: news articles, autobiographies, fiction, editorials and political cartoons. Such integrated exercises will strengthen your child’s ability to scrutinize both informational and literary texts with equal confidence and effectiveness.

Schedule

Course Overview

Grade: 5-8

SAT Prep will develop and fortify your critical thinking, analytical reasoning and problem-solving abilities to prepare you for what many argue is the most decisive college admissions exam of your high school career. Created by the College Board, the Scholastic Assessment Test or SAT measures a student’s acquired knowledge of critical reading, writing and mathematics. Taken by more than two million students every year, many also contend that this test predicts a student’s success with undergraduate coursework. This SAT Prep course will help your student to unlock the more obscure aspects of the exam like question types, educated guessing and “key word recognition”. In addition, this course will elucidate the following: approaches to reading passages and passage-based questions, approaches to multiple-choice writing questions, approaches to expository essay writing, understanding algebraic structure and taking practice tests. Lastly, students will demonstrate a thorough knowledge of learned material through a battery of integrated and practical project-based experiences.

Instructor Bio

Crystal Adair

Crystal Adair is a native of Washington, DC and a proud product of the DC Public School System. In 1997, she graduated summa cum laude from Clark Atlanta University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Media Arts (Radio-Television-Film). Trained as a broadcast journalist and highly skilled in both oratory and the dramatic arts, Crystal’s lifelong commitment is to help our youth “find their own voices”. This author, filmmaker, playwright and impassioned public speaker has been teaching English, Public Speaking and Fine Arts for more than 15 years. As importantly, she has worked with students and adults from all over the globe and from every grade level between kindergarten and college. Additionally, Crystal has written, produced and directed more than 75 stage plays, special programs and film projects throughout her career, while also successfully coaching hundreds of student speakers for regional competitions, Broadway auditions and even the Disney channel! Finally, Crystal’s greatest ambitions are to finally publish her memoir, Therapy, and to launch her own performing and visual arts non-profit program for youth who live in underserved communities. Crystal currently resides in Prince Georges County, MD with her very precocious and uber-talented ten-year old son, Jalen Christopher.